…plus the cream in the center.

I received an e-mail from Senator Bill Nelson (D-Fl) informing his constituents of how serious he is about staying away from the mud-slinging and bad talking about the “other” political party. He does say that it’s both the Republicans as well as the Democrats that are responsible for the problems in America.

Here is the letter he sent out to the people in his district, followed by the response I sent to him.

After watching Standard & Poor’s performance in the Enron and housing debacles, it’s hard to stomach their decision to downgrade America’s credit.

But even coming from S&P, there is a message we should hear: The finger pointing and hyper-partisanship has to stop. If it doesn’t, we really will be on the road to ruin.

Democrats need to see tea partiers as something other than debt-limit hostage-taking Republicans. And Republicans need to see President Barack Obama and Democrats as something other than big-spending socialists.

We’ve got to stop this attack madness. We have to bring civility back to the public square. We have to put the country back on the path to fiscal sanity.

To do that, we need to cut some $4 trillion to $5 trillion. We made a down payment on this with the $2 trillion dollars we cut just last week. Now we need to go further.

To understand what we have to do, though, we first need to look at how we got here.

We went from a $236 billion budget surplus in 2000 to a $1.3 trillion deficit last year — and a record $14 trillion debt. A huge chunk of the debt comes from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We’re bringing the troops home.

Another significant piece stems from the Bush-era tax cuts. Warren Buffett, chairman and chief executive officer of Berkshire Hathaway, says the tax cuts for the wealthy should be left to expire. They’re set to do so at the end of next year. We should let that happen.

Agree or not, don’t you think most Americans were better off before the tax cuts than they are now?

Much of the rest of the debt comes from the economic downturn since 2008.

That brings us to today. And there’s no mystery about what we have to do. It’s just common sense. In addition to the spending cuts Congress just made, we need tax reform.

And by tax reform, I mean closing loopholes, special interest tax breaks and corporate subsidies. It’s just plain wrong to be protecting tax breaks for oil companies and to be rewarding businesses that ship jobs overseas.

As chairman of the Senate Finance Committee’s Fiscal Responsibility and Economic Growth Subcommittee, I’ve scheduled a hearing for early September to investigate closing many of these loopholes. Doing so will likely generate $2 trillion over the next decade. Add that to the $2 trillion in spending cuts we’ve made — and we’re in the $4 trillion range that we need to hit.

It’s time to stop the shouting and bickering and political attacks. It’s time to show the world that America can take care of business.

Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) is a member of the Senate Finance and Budget committees.

Senator,

The piece that you wrote for Politico is nothing but a poor attempt to convince me to vote for you next year. I will tell you that that will never happen.

Your attempt to lie to the American people about the so-called surplus in 2000 is just something else for me to tell my neighbors and friends about when they ask me for my political advice. The surplus you refer to was nothing more than a projected number if nothing in the equation would change. You know damn well that politicians, both Republicans and Democrats alike, do nothing to stop the spending of our tax dollars.

As for the $2 million you say that Congress just cut is also a lie. Again you cut money from the projected spending that you guys would like to do in the future. It’s like me saying I saved $90,000 this year since I wanted to spend $150,000 next year and will only spend $60,000. Of course I only make $60,000 a year, but that doesn’t matter since I saved $90,000 from “cutting” my spending.

It’s politicians like yourself that has ruined this country and too bad we are left to deal with you and your type forever since there is no term limits for you Senators and Congressman.

If you want to get my vote, pass a term limit bill before your next five weeks vacation that you and your fellow politicians don’t deserve. You civic service was never meant to be a career.

As for tax reform, absolutely we need tax reform. Let’s get it all over with and enact the Fair Tax Plan and get rid of the IRS. If it wasn’t for taxes, you guys would have nothing to use to get the different classes of people mad at each other which takes the focus off of the crap you and the others are doing in Washington DC. There are two classes in this country, the citizen class and the political class.

As for your last section where you state, “It’s time to show the world that America can take care of business.”, You are so right and for us as a country to do that, we need to clean out the House and the Senate of all politicians that have held the office for more than 6 years. Working along side of GOOOH.com (Get Out Of Our House) we are working to make that happen.

In closing, I want to thank you for your time in sending out this e-mail to remind me and my fellow readers/subscribers and countrymen of what’s important to America.

This morning, August 8,2001, before the markets even opened, Rick Santelli was asked about what he thought about all the events since last Friday night when Standard and Poors downgraded the credit rating of the U.S. His response as well as his analogies to the current situation is awesome. If you’ve watch CNBC during the trading day on Wall street, you know Rick Santelli for his reports live on the Chicago Board of Trade, where he is also known for his occasional rants. His rants (in my opinion) are so clear and straight to the point, it’s awesome.

Rick Santelli clearly does not agree, condone or accept the lack of leadership in Washington. I have to agree with him myself since I also share that same view. Obama and all the other politicians (both Republicans and Democrats) in Washington (oops I forgot, they’re on five weeks vacation) have shown no leadership skills during the last few months. What happened in the past week is just part of the results.

From Timothy Geithner telling Congress in April, 2011 that he sees no risk at all to the United States losing it’s “AAA” credit rating, to Obama’s lame speech today, we can see the lack of leadership.

If we, the American voter, don’t stand up and tell Congress and the president to do the job we sent them to Washington to do, we as a nation will lose more than we already have.

Here’s the video to Rick Santelli’s rant this morning. I know you’ll enjoy it as much as I did.

With all the talk about the debt ceiling and the politics being played out, I think it’s time to ship diapers to Washington DC. Obama, along with congress have been trying to come to an agreement on raising the debt ceiling or not. Obama want to raise it $2.4 trillion, Congress wants to keep it down to about $1.4 trillion. Eric Cantor, House Majority Leader and seven other Congressional leaders met yesterday to work out what can be done to accomplish this task.

Of course, in true form of politicians, nothing was done except Obama and Cantor had their feelings hurt and walked out of the meeting. Depending on who you talk to, you will get different comments as to what happened behind closed doors. Either way you look at it, our political leaders are more concerned about their chances in next year’s election instead of what’s right for the country. Obama (like the kid in the playground with his marbles) is threatening to veto any bill that is put before him if he doesn’t get his way. The president said that he’s concerned for the American people. So if he is, why isn’t he eliminating programs that are draining the system?

The big problem that politicians are faced with, is if they have to close portions of the government for any length of time, the American people may realize that these programs weren’t needed in the first place and there won’t be a need to be reinstated once the crisis is over. Obama has used scare tactics this week by saying he can’t guarantee that the social security checks will go out in August. He knows that will not be the case and saying it just shows you how he’s willing to play ball.

Every time the threat of the country (or State) having to shut down part of the government, politicians will always use the tactic of claiming that the police, firefighters and medicare will be the programs that will be affected. This isn’t the case since there are so many other ones (parks, museums and rest areas) that can be cut for the time being (if not permanent).

So in the meantime, politicians will sit there and use spin tactics to scare the people and in turn whine and complain about the way things are getting done. If you think about it, the government is working exactly the way our politicians have set it up to work…poorly.

WASHINGTON – Libertarian Party (LP) Chairman William Redpath issued the following statement today in response to President Barack Obama‘s State of the Union address:

“Tonight’s speech was a reminder that, for decades, the policies of Republicans and Democrats alike have failed. Libertarians are asking people to take matters into their own hands. Instead of just complaining, we’re encouraging ordinary Americans to step up and run for Congress on the Libertarian Party ballot line.

I can say exactly the same thing about President Obama’s speech tonight that I said about George W. Bush’s State of the Union speech in January 2008: ‘Tonight’s State of the Union address went much as expected. Instead of calling for a more limited role of the federal government in American society, the President laid out plans that would only increase the government’s intervention into the realm of economics, health care, education and foreign policy.

I am weary of the President’s unspoken premise that only government–indeed, only the federal government–can accomplish good in our society.

President Obama seems to be totally blind to the concept that government can cause problems rather than solve them. His speech was filled with ‘More': more handouts, more spending, more programs, more bailouts, more regulations. We Libertarians want less government, not more.

Not to be outmatched by the Democrats, the Republican Party conveyed its lack of seriousness in addressing this nation’s government spending problems by having Bob McDonnell, Virginia Governor for eleven (11) days, deliver its rebuttal to the President. If they were really serious about addressing the dire fiscal circumstances of this nation, they would have had Paul Ryan, a six-term congressman from Wisconsin, who has proposed the most serious plan of anyone in the two older parties to keep us from going off a fiscal cliff.

Last week, Alan Auerbach, Professor of Economics and Law at UC Berkeley and US government fiscal policy expert, said that the Democratic and Republican parties are in a ‘death embrace’ with their government spending. The only political party that is rationally and forthrightly addressing the need to cut government spending and end our culture of ever expanding entitlements is the Libertarian Party.

As Americans lose hope in Obama, we Libertarians are warning voters against running back to the Republicans who got us into such big messes in the first place. Republicans started the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Republicans made the false intellectual case for bailing out banks and car companies. Republicans argued that deficits don’t matter. Republicans gave us the giant Medicare expansion bill.

The President’s suggestion of a ‘spending freeze’ was especially ludicrous and insulting to the intelligence of Americans. The amounts involved are minuscule, and Congress won’t accept them anyway. Will Obama sign the spending bills that ignore his ‘freeze’? You bet he will. Instead, the President should demand across-the-board cuts in all areas, including entitlements.

The President talked a lot about jobs. Unfortunately, the policies he supports are responsible for most of the unemployment we see today. High taxes, minimum wage laws, hiring regulations, firing regulations, mandatory unemployment benefits, and other government interference make it much more difficult for businesses to hire and keep employees. As expected, the President’s prescription is to increase the dosage of this government poison.

While our nation is declining dangerously right now, a turnaround could be straightforward and simple with steps like these: 1. Bring our troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan; 2. Stop rewarding failed companies with bailouts; 3. Cut taxes and spending and let the free market work.

Finally, on the matter of political rhetoric, I call upon the two older parties to stop spoon feeding politics to the American people as if we are a bunch of overgrown children. These are difficult times that call for more than rhetorical flourish or positioning a group of diverse people around a politician. Older party politicians need to be specific about their proposed policies, as Libertarians are.

And, I know I’m probably just wasting electrons, but can’t we go back to the days in which the President sent a copy of his speech to Congress and left it at that. The speech last night took 1/7000th of an entire year. I think the vast majority of the American people would agree that we have better ways to spend our time.”

William Redpath has served as the Chairman of the Libertarian Party since 2006. For more information, or to arrange an interview, call LP Executive Director Wes Benedict at 202-333-0008 ext. 222.

The LP is America’s third-largest political party, founded in 1971. The Libertarian Party stands for free markets and civil liberties.